1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computer systems, and in particular to a method and system for protecting and recovering operating systems of computing devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various software tools exist for performing backups of computing devices and restoring the backed up versions of the data. Such tools allow for graceful recovery from user error, hardware failure, power outage, unexpected errors, disasters, or any other loss of data. Many of these tools require an administrator to separate the components and devices into those that are critical and those that are not. Unfortunately, this type of manual determination of what constitutes critical and non-critical devices is fraught with error. It is possible for an administrator to supervise a backup that the administrator believes is capable of restoring the system at some future point. However, unbeknownst to the administrator, the backup may be incapable of successfully restoring the operating system because some critical components were unintentionally left out. Unfortunately, the administrator may not realize the error until the restore operation fails, at which point it is too late to correct.
For example, a system may include a server hosting various applications. The administrator may have correctly identified and selected the critical devices in the original server configuration, but the critical services and components of the server may have changed over time, and the administrator may not have updated the selection of critical devices to match these changes. Therefore, the backup will not include all of the critical devices that are required to restore the operating system of the server.
Performing backup and restore operations may therefore require substantial human intervention to complete. The need for such intervention makes such tasks error-prone, tedious, and time-consuming. Improved approaches for handling the backup and restoration of critical system devices and components are therefore desired.